Basketball Game Day with DiGiorno Pizza!

My favorite sport is soccer, specifically either British Premier League or World Cup soccer, as anyone who follows me has long since learned. My son is a much more of a basketball fan, alas, whether it’s watching college or NBA games on TV, playing on his school team, hustling up a pick-up game at the gym or just playing H.O.R.S.E. in the driveway with his buddies. We’re definitely a basketball house, and heck, we must have a dozen basketballs in the garage too, though I don’t really understand where they all came from!

March has a special significance in college basketball as it’s the equivalent of the World Cup, where the best college team is crowned, so you can bet that when homework’s done and we have down time, the TV’s keeping us updated on the latest rivalry. And what better way to enjoy a good basketball game than with some good game munchies and food? At 13yo, my boy’s a bit young for a cold brewski but we’re all fans of that quintessential American food, pizza and that’s our snack of choice.

When DiGiorno offered us the chance to try their new Stuffed Crust pizzas while watching a basketball game, we knew it was a match made in heaven and went for it without a moment’s hesitation.

We learned that there are two varieties of pizza that have the new stuffed cheese crust: Buffalo Chicken and Sausage, Peppers and Onions. While G- tells everyone that he dislikes onions, he eats onion rings, enjoys onion soup and, yes, was happy to try the DiGiorno Stuffed Crust Sausage, Peppers and Onions pizza. The buffalo chicken was a no brainer: we are both big fans of buffalo wings and spicy foods, and that was both our favorite of the two.

Here’s a close-up of the Buffalo Chicken slice, perfectly cooked:

See? Doesn’t that look tasty? And you can see the cheese in the crust. It addresses the philosophical question: can you ever have too much cheese on a pizza?

To mix things up, we headed to the local Walmart and it was pretty darn impressive. DiGiorno (a division of Nestlé) almost has an entire aisle to itself they have so many pizza types and varieties. And lots of fans: while I was standing there trying to figure out exactly which pizzas to buy a number of people came by, grabbed their favorite, and continued with their own shopping. Heck, if DiGiorno had “pull-the-tab-and-eat-it-now” pizzas, people would be eating ’em by the time they got to the soup aisle!

What does the DiGiorno section look like? Here’s a subset of the display:

Purely from a brand dominance perspective, it’s darn impressive. There’s pizza, pizza and breadsticks, pizza and wings, stuffed pizza, pizza “dipping strips”, as many variations of dough + sauce + toppings as you can possibly imagine. In fact, you can check out all the varieties and variations on pizza, along with the rest of the Nestlé line, at Walmart.

The biggest issue with having something like pizza while watching a fast-moving game like college basketball, it turns out, is avoiding spills as a bite turns into a cheer for a beautifully executed three-pointer or hollers of discontent as a rough block drops a player to the court unexpectedly. Our carpet survived, but our cat Kiwi might never be the same again. And those calls! Yeesh. It’s almost as good as a soccer fixture! 🙂

We cut up the two pizzas into traditional triangle slices, as you can see in this close-up of the Sausage, Peppers and Onions pizza:

Again, the cheese is just oozing out of the crust (actually it looks like it’s sneaking towards the pepper in this photo, but that’s just the way the slice came out!)

Generally my kids like to dip their crusts in honey but with the cheese, we instead warmed up some pizza sauce we had in the fridge and at one point I wondered if it would have been easier to just cook the crust and skip the pizza entirely. Then again, that’s why DiGiorno sells “dipping pizza”. Smart.

I do my best to feed my children healthy, home-cooked meals, but truth be told, it’s a lot of work and consumes a rather huge amount of time, time I don’t often have. So when I can toss a pizza in the oven and pull out a piping-hot meal 20min later, I’m a big fan. And the fact that my son and his pals are more than happy to snarf down a slice or three, then enjoy the crust separately, while we’re all enjoying a good game of college basketball makes this a pretty nice slam-dunk in my eyes.

And as for those basketball games, well, we’ve been to a couple of games at the local university — and in one, G- got to be a ball boy, standing under the hoop and wiping the floor clean after each play — and that was terrific fun.

His big comment afterwards? “Those guy sure use a lot of naughty words, Daddy!”

Then again, that was a few years ago. Now, a few weeks away from turning 14, he might not even remark on language likely not dissimilar to his own when he’s with his buddies and us parents aren’t around to overhear. 🙂

Check out more DiGiorno pizza stories at flavorfulmoments.net too…